[This is another catch-up entry spanning the week of 17th – 23rd December, 2023. This one is a doozy of a rant, so be warned!]
Thursday, 21st December
I’ve been having some really confusing emotions around my music this week.
A few months ago I contributed to a Kickstarter campaign by independent musician, Jewelia. I found out about her through a music production Facebook group for women and gender minorities called 2% Rising.
She was running her own music blog at the time and took submissions from artists in that group. I put myself forward and she very kindly wrote an article about a collab single I put out with W0lfpak called Traveling. This was one of the first times my music had ever been reviewed on a blog, especially by someone I didn’t really know.
Little Wins
A couple of years later, I see on her Instagram that she’s making an album called Little Wins, and her feed had some cool boxer imagery with a feminine pastel twist. I really liked the idea of celebrating small victories, particularly when you feel your place in society isn’t one of bold, obvious moves, but of the seemingly unimpressive increments that lead to your private successes.
The album was done and dusted and ready for Christmas and she sent out all the perks and rewards for each backer. Part of my pledge included receiving a physical copy of the album.
I opened Jewelia’s package to me and nearly cried at the letter she sent. Because it reminds me I want to do the things she and many of the artists I follow are doing. But I’m having such a hard time believing there are enough people who want to hear my music to support those kinds of things.
I want to be heard. I don’t mean my music necessarily. I mean me. I want to be heard. When I feel like I am being heard, I want to write music less. But then I also feel I have a sort of duty to the craft than I’m not allowed to put down after carrying it for as long as I have.
I asked myself what I’d be if I wasn’t making music. Some part of myself said, “Happy.” Is that true?
The End?
I sent off my capability for work questionnaire this week. I think all this is coming to an end. Have I missed my chance to make something of myself? Will regret not doing more with my time out of employment? Right now I don’t want to do more.
I needed time to fix so much stuff that was wrong in my mindset, things wrong in my psychology and physiology both. I enjoyed long periods of just stopping. Doing nothing. Doing very simple, practical tasks for myself and others. Tasks with a clear indication they had been completed to the best of my ability.
Music isn’t like that. ‘Finished’ is a bit of a myth and ‘successful’ is an even more difficult thing to pin down. But if I’ve made mine and my daughter’s beds today? Well look, the beds are made! I don’t have to look at my analytics to check the sheets are in place. They just are because I just did it. It feels like I have some tiny amount of power to complete something.
Being a musician in the digital age robs you of all sense of completion, competency, satisfaction or joy. It always feels like you’re doing something wrong or you should be doing it differently. It always feels like it’s not enough. It always feels like a guessing game since no two projects will get you the same result, if you can even bring yourself to complete and share them.
I’m tired of the relentless climb to the top of Maslow’s pyramid, the hierarchy of needs. What’s the point of self-actualisation when you’re not even sure who you want to be any more?
A Better Excuse
I clung to the dream of being a singer songwriter for so long in part because I’d claimed it as my spiritual purpose or ‘ministry’ since that was the acceptable way to frame one’s dreams in a church setting. Now I no longer have the basis of belief for that, it’s difficult to know what the point of my possible contributions to art or music would even be.
It was easy to ‘excuse’ myself by saying, oh well this music has a worshipful purpose so it’s ok that I’m making it! Now that matters to me much less, I feel like I’m having to come up with new excuses as to why I should even be doing all this. I’ve tried to ‘give myself permission’ for many years but I really just feel like a hack at this point.
Perhaps in life one must climb both up and down that pyramid in order to find balance and peace. Sometimes I’ve gotten to a certain point with my music and felt so much emotional vertigo because I knew I didn’t have the internal resolve or certainty of self to deal with what opportunities may come my way. So I had to ‘come down’ to strengthen the lower layers.
These days I feel like a stubborn old goat in the way I think about it all. If there was ever a time I was ready on a personal level to have success in music, it is now. But there are so many factors out of my control, especially regarding my health. And the things I am in control of, I’m finding ever so difficult to actually get to doing.
Do I really want this? Is it time to become someone different? To find new people to be around, people who have no idea I’m a musician or creative person at all?
Living Things
Then I think, what about the songs? Don’t they get a say? Don’t they get a chance to be heard in some way before their relevance fades completely?
They are in some sense living things now, brought into being by a careless songwriter who didn’t realise what she was doing when she gave them breath and yet denied them an audience. There’s a certain amount of pain in that idea. It’s a pain I carry with me every day.
I wish I could just show you it all and not care about the outcome. But the pain of putting your heart out there for people to see, and having no one interested in seeing it, is a far greater pain. It’s a pain that I’ve felt almost every time I’ve released songs. And that’s what’s kept me in this particular brand of limbo the last few years.
Hurting over incomplete work is one thing. Hurting that no one cares feels worse. My only way out of this is to stop caring that no one cares, but that requires knowing what I’m making songs for.
And I don’t have an answer to that right now.
Caryl